


old familiar ways

by stillscape



Series: tumblr prompts collection [4]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, as of 2x09 anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 22:32:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13374429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: The thing about kissing Jughead is that it’s supposed to be a full-body experience, and she has not felt his hands on her in longer than she cares to remember.She pauses for just long enough to swipe the edge of his old t-shirt over her eyes. Once her vision is clear again, she faces him head-on, waiting. So many times, they’ve gotten to this point—the first breath—only for Jughead to mutter her name in a way that saysBetty, please don’t.Or: four years later, they start putting the pieces back together.





	old familiar ways

**Author's Note:**

> A companion to [(nothing but the) dead and dying](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13271628), a.k.a. "help, I've falled into a Paul Simon Angst Death Spiral and I can't get out." This one is indebted to "Still Crazy After All These Years." 
> 
> With thanks to village_skeptic for her usual explicit endorsement of all my behaviors, including but not limited to: flashbacks, Paul Simon Angst Death Spirals, and generating way more Archie Andrews future head canon than was necessary for this fic.

“Betts.” 

He pauses, and in that moment, Betty’s heart—once again—stumbles its way into a resigned halt. 

But then he speaks again. 

“I never stopped loving you either.” 

Jughead looks as though he might cry, but she’s the one who actually does. Unsurprising, she thinks, since she’s been on the edge of tears for what feels like days, if not weeks. Or months, even. 

“You jerk,” she chokes out, fitting the words between two small sobs even as her heart threatens to burst completely. “Four years, Jughead. _Four years_.” 

He shifts against the headboard, moving as if to hold her. And she does want to be held; she needs it, even. But more than that, she wants to _have_ him, to take every bit of Jughead away from himself, to keep him from being able to come up with yet another round of reasons they shouldn’t. And so, instead of letting him respond, she swings a leg over him, straddles his lap, and starts kissing the hell out of him. 

The thing about Jughead is that regardless of what he does or does not want at any particular moment, he will still kiss her back. He has always kissed her back. (Not just her. She knows he kissed Toni back, too, that one time. He might have kissed other girls back, girls she doesn’t know about.) He has never once flat-out rejected her, only responded with diminishing amounts of enthusiasm until she finally stopped trying. 

The thing about kissing Jughead is that it’s supposed to be a full-body experience, and she has not felt his hands on her in longer than she cares to remember. 

She pauses for just long enough to swipe the edge of his old t-shirt over her eyes. Once her vision is clear again, she faces him head-on, waiting. So many times, they’ve gotten to this point—the first breath—only for Jughead to mutter her name in a way that says _Betty, please don’t_. 

The last time she kissed him was over a year ago, in the parking lot behind her freshman-year dormitory, after he’d shown up unexpectedly one Friday afternoon in October to ask for her help getting into college and out of Riverdale. She’d known, immediately, that uttering the words _I don’t know how to do this on my own; I don’t think I can_ was the hardest thing he could imagine doing. Trusting her with those words, with the little part of himself that was the most vulnerable and insecure, was a more precious gift than a hundred signed first editions of Toni Morrison. She kissed him before he left the next morning, _just in case_ (in case what? In case he didn’t make it out after all?), and though she could feel the ghosts of his hands on her face, her waist, her hips, his actual hands had remained firmly planted on the handlebars of his motorcycle. 

_That’s it, then_ , she had thought at the time. She left before he could even get to the _Betty_ ; she left without another word, clenching her fists tight to keep herself from crying. 

The thing about kissing Jughead this time…

“I love you, Betty Cooper,” he says, voice so low it’s almost a whisper; an echo of a night they shared four years ago, before every part of their lives went to hell. One hand slides across her jaw and behind her ear as the other finds her shoulder, and then she’s on her back with Jughead over her, practically pinning her to the mattress. 

The thing about kissing Jughead this time is that he makes it abundantly clear he does not want to let her go.

  
  
  
  


Her dad drove down to Syracuse to pick her up for Thanksgiving, and as they crested the final hill and Riverdale came into view, Betty found herself thinking only that she’d made it. What “it” was, exactly, remained elusive to her. She had made it out of Riverdale, she’d made it through more than half a semester of college, and now she had made it _back_ to Riverdale (entirely because her father had come to get her). 

When she phrased things that way, none of _it_ seemed like much of an accomplishment. 

It was the Friday before Thanksgiving; unlike most of her friends’ schools, Syracuse took the entire week off from classes. That meant she had four or five extra days to fill before they got back, four or five days to be spent with only her family for company. She could have driven the short distance over to Potsdam to see Archie, she supposed, but she knew he’d need to catch up on work before his own break. Besides, it seemed silly to make the drive when he’d be back in Riverdale in a few days anyway. 

(And she had missed Polly and the twins. She _had_. But four or five days stuck in a house with rambunctious toddlers was… well.) 

Her mother greeted her in the kitchen with one of her warmer hugs. Then she took a step backwards, swept her eyes up and down Betty’s frame, and said, “You look pale.” 

“I’m going to go for a walk, okay?” Betty said, quickly grabbing up her keys and coat before anyone could protest. “I need to stretch my legs.” 

Unable to think of anywhere else to go, she walked to Pop’s, where she was greeted warmly by everyone—except Jughead, who wasn’t there. 

“Don’t you worry about your boy,” Pop told her, when he brought over her vanilla milkshake. He must have noticed how many times her eyes had already flickered to the back grill, which was currently being manned by a fry cook she didn’t know. “He’s doing fine.” 

Betty nodded. She put a straw in the milkshake and twiddled it between her fingers without drinking. She did not tell Pop that Jughead wasn’t _her boy_ , that he hadn’t been for a long time now, that he no longer wanted to be. 

“What you did for him,” Pop continued, giving an oddly significant nod to the napkin dispenser. “He appreciates that. I know it.” 

“The budget?” she asked, and Pop nodded again. Betty felt the corner of her mouth turn up, ever so slightly. “Sometimes being a complete nerd comes in handy.” 

Late that night, as she lay in her childhood bed getting ahead on the reading for her American lit class, she received a text from Jughead. _Heard you were back for the break_ , it said. She replied in the affirmative at once. Then she waited. 

Twenty minutes later, there was a loud _thump_ against her bedroom window. She jumped to her feet, heart racing. 

It was only the wind. 

Jughead called her a few minutes after that, and they made unspecified arrangements to hang out the next day. They met by Pickens Park and then just sort of started walking in no particular direction, ending up on the banks of Sweetwater River. It had been a mild fall, so far, but rainy. A pale, gray sunlight washed over them as they trudged through sodden dead leaves and shoe-sucking mud, and Betty wondered why she still found all of it so beautiful. 

Ever since Jughead’s return from his summer in Toledo, he had alternated between his crown beanie and his Serpents jacket—always one or the other, but never both. Today he wore neither. She wondered what that meant, or whether it meant anything at all, but felt it better not to ask. She felt him, too, felt his presence beside her, felt a gentle but undeniable pull every time they accidentally stepped a little too close to each other. 

But Jughead kept his hands firmly in his pockets, and therefore, so did she.

  
  
  
  


The sex (when they finally get to it, after a snowy trek to the corner store for condoms) is _amazing_. 

“Four years, Jughead.” Now, reveling in the afterglow, she tries to sound lighter. Teasing, if that’s possible. “Four years.” 

He groans, first burying his face in her hair before dragging his lips across the side of her neck. “Two and a half,” he corrects her. “Technically.” 

Betty’s mind flashes back over the small handful of times they’d come so far unglued as to go all the way. Each one had seemed so significant then, bursting with meaning, but now… Now those memories seem desperate. Painful, even. She finds she does not want to revisit them. 

She wants this Jughead, though, the one who’s confident enough to be a little cocky, snarky even, and trust she won’t take it the wrong way. The one who can be a little cocky while refusing to move his hand from her hip, who still has one of his legs flung over hers, who—when she wriggles underneath him, indicating that she really ought to go clean up—merely holds on tighter. 

She wonders whether there was anyone else for him in those two and a half years, and even though she knows she isn’t afraid of the answer—knows there’s no reason for Jughead not to have slept with someone, knows that it doesn’t make a difference if he did—she decides she doesn’t want to ask. 

Instead she says, “I have to get up.” 

He lets her go, and when she’s alone in the bathroom she starts crying without knowing exactly why. 

Betty takes a long, hot shower, not even caring that she has to wash her hair with cheap drugstore shampoo and her face with a bar of soap. The mirror fogs over and she’s glad for that when she steps out of the shower, glad she's exempt from examining her own reflection. 

Jughead’s put a clean towel on the back of the toilet, and she’s glad for that too. 

She’s so tired of crying.

  
  
  
  


Jughead hadn’t told Betty what time he and F.P. were supposed to leave for Oswego—F.P. driving the truck with all Jughead’s stuff, Jughead following on the motorcycle—but she wanted to say goodbye, and so she guessed. That turned out to be a good thing, because she arrived at the trailer to find the two of them entrenched in a furious but completely silent argument. There were a few boxes on the ground, just past the front steps, but no one was making a move to put them in the truck. No one was making any kind of move, unless you counted wary circling on Jughead's part and uncertain stumbling on F.P.’s.

“Just… don’t, Betty,” Jughead said, when she got out of her car. 

“Is he…” 

Jughead pushed past her, heading back for the trailer; she followed. “Not allowed to drive, that’s for fucking sure.” 

“It’s ten in the morning.” 

This earned her a look of vaguely righteous anger which, upon consideration, she decided she did not deserve. “Yeah,” Jughead spat. “I’m well aware of what time it is.” 

“Well, don’t take it out on _me_ ,” she spat back, and all at once, Jughead crumbled. 

She got him into her car—only after they were sure he was in possession of both the truck _and_ the motorcycle keys—and drove to Pop’s, where they sat in the parking lot without getting out. 

“All week,” Jughead said, looking out the window instead of at her. “All _month_. All he’s been doing is saying how _proud_ he is.” He did not, Betty noticed, include the words _of me_. 

She removed her right hand from the gear shift and placed it over Jughead’s left. “I’m sorry, Jug.” 

His thumb twitched, rubbing back and forth on the thigh of his jeans. 

“It’s fine,” he said; she felt a sudden flash of terror at the thought that Jughead might mean he wasn't going after all, and a huge sense of relief when he continued. “I can take a few days’ worth of clothes on the bike. That’s all I really need anyway.” 

Betty thought about towels, and bedsheets, and the old crock pot she’d found for him at the thrift store. 

“I’ll drive you,” she said. 

This, finally, made Jughead turn away from the window. “You’re leaving tomorrow,” he pointed out. 

“Yeah. I’m already packed; I just have to load up. I’m not taking that much stuff with me.” Her new apartment was coming mostly furnished, and she knew his was too; her car had a large enough trunk and backseat. This would work. “Oswego is less than an hour from Syracuse. I can leave a day early, no problem.” 

He continued to eye her, skeptically. 

“Come on, let’s eat,” she said, nodding towards the diner. “We’ll go get my stuff, we can pick up yours on the way out of town, and we’ll just… _go_. I’ll call the rental office on the way down and tell them I’m moving in today instead of tomorrow. It’ll be fine.” 

Only when he was halfway through an enormous stack of pancakes did Jughead finally agree to her plan, albeit indirectly. 

“Your mom’s going to be furious,” he said. 

“My mom’s at one of her ‘journalism retreats,’” Betty said, rolling her eyes. “She’s meeting me there tomorrow. My dad won’t care that much. Polly doesn’t even know what day of the week it is most of the time.” 

Jughead lifted two eyebrows over the remainder of his pancakes. “What would I do without you, Cooper?” 

He fell back into a terrible mood as soon as they reappeared at the trailer, though, and she had to bite her tongue to keep herself from nagging him to be careful on the bike. She called and left a message with her rental agency instead.

Many hours later, they’d successfully moved all of Jughead’s belongings into his new apartment, a slightly shabby but well-maintained little studio a few miles from campus, and unpacked about half of them. It was only then that Betty noticed the voicemail from her rental agency informing her that the office was closing early that day and she’d have to be in Syracuse by four if she wanted to pick up her keys. It was well past four now. 

She played the message on speaker, and when it was over, she and Jughead locked eyes. Would he mind if she stayed, she wondered? Riverdale was at least five hours away, and it was getting late. 

“It’s a double bed, Betts,” he said wearily, after a beat. “It’s fine.” 

“I should have checked my phone earlier.” 

“It’s fine,” he repeated. 

They ordered a pizza, and ate it when it arrived. They finished unpacking Jughead’s belongings. The apartment started feeling claustrophobic after dinner, so they left it, finding a footpath that took them across the edge of a park and then to the lakefront. 

“It’s pretty here,” Betty said. She wished they hadn’t arrived at the lake just in time to catch a spectacular late-summer sunset. 

Jughead said nothing. 

Jughead remained mostly silent until they turned out the lights and crawled into opposite sides of the bed and lay, awkwardly, as far apart as possible. Or at least, that’s what Betty thought they were doing—she had deliberately turned away from him—until she felt a light tap on her shoulder. 

She rolled over, and found Jughead on his back, staring at the ceiling.

“Thank you,” he said. 

Betty swallowed. “Of course.” 

“I’m sorry I’ve been shitty all day.” 

“It’s okay, Jug,” she said, scooting a little bit closer. “Honestly. It…your dad, he…” 

“Is never going to change.” The words left his mouth as though he’d only _just_ come to believe them (but still didn’t want to), and Betty’s heart twisted into several knots. “It was stupid of me to think otherwise.” 

Why was it, she wondered suddenly, that it was so much easier to talk in the dark? Why was it easier even now, when she was much more afraid of the dark than she ever had been as a child? 

Without thinking too much about it, she edged a little closer, and then a little closer still, until she realized she’d curled all the way up against his side. The night was warm and Jughead was even warmer. Heat radiated from his skin, and it felt sticky with anger. Still, he didn’t protest, and so she didn’t move; she just put her hand over his heart, and willed his pulse to slow down. 

“He is proud of you,” she said. “You know that, right? And—and I am too.” 

Jughead did not respond, and after a few minutes, she shifted off of him, thinking it better to move before he asked her to. She turned her back to him, said goodnight, and closed her eyes. 

The bed creaked and shook. She felt her hair being lifted from the bare skin between her camisole straps, and then she felt knuckles gently tracing the divide of her shoulder blades. 

Her breath caught. 

Jughead took his hand away seconds later, but the ghost of his touch lingered for what felt like hours, until Betty finally fell asleep. 

For the first time in what seemed like forever, she did not have bad dreams.

  
  
  
  


They were better friends, after that. 

Jughead didn’t even complain when she showed up on his birthday. (The fact that she restrained herself from mentioning said birthday probably helped.) He was waiting on his building’s front steps when she drove by looking for parking, and he was still there when she walked up a few minutes later. The skin on her palms felt raw, but she’d checked it before leaving her car and knew it was unbroken. 

“Hungry?” she said. 

Jughead unfolded himself from the steps. “You’ve met me, right?” 

“A few times,” Betty said lightly. 

“Pizza, burgers, what?” 

“Whatever you want.” 

He gestured in the opposite direction than the one she’d just come from. “Everything’s that way. It’s, like…a twenty-minute walk.” 

“That sounds good,” she said, and they headed off. 

The sun had already started slipping away, and Betty shivered a little in her thin cotton pullover. She had a jacket in her car, but she hadn’t thought to grab it. 

Silently, Jughead untied the flannel shirt from around his waist and handed it to her. 

“Thanks,” she said, slipping her arms into the sleeves. 

“Sure.” 

Pizza won out. Betty ordered a salad, too; it turned out to be big enough to split, and she raised an eyebrow and scooped half of it onto Jughead’s plate, expecting him to protest. Instead he unrolled his fork from his paper napkin and dug in. 

“This is a new development,” she said. 

Jughead shot her a look that was, maybe, half annoyed. “I’ve never hated vegetables.” 

“I’ve never seen you eat them.” 

“I ate them when your mom made them,” he said, and she decided to shut up about vegetables. 

He never hinted that she ought to leave, and so she stayed until it was definitely too late to drive back. When the black feeling crept up on her around one in the morning, she reached behind her, found his arm, and hugged it around herself until the blackness subsided to a more muted gray. 

When she finally felt okay enough to let go, she did, but Jughead’s arm remained. A moment later, she heard a gentle snore, and realized he’d fallen asleep that way. Carefully—so she wouldn’t wake him—she scooted backwards, getting just close enough to feel his breath on the back of her neck. Then she laced her fingers through his and counted sheep until she drifted off too.

  
  
  
  


Veronica took one look at Betty’s tiny studio apartment—which somehow remained relentlessly beige, even with a layer of Halloween decorations on top of all the pink and blue Betty had added when she moved in—and announced “You’re staying at the hotel with me.” 

“Is there room for me?” Betty asked, just because she felt like she ought to protest against staying at a hotel when she had a perfectly good apartment. A weekend at wherever Veronica had booked a room sounded heavenly, though. Knowing Veronica, there would be a whirlpool tub, or at least really nice bubble bath to go in a normal tub, and the bed would almost certainly be softer than what she had here. The walls were probably more soundproof than her apartment’s, which would be welcome. 

“Of course there is. It’s girls’ sleepover weekend, top to bottom. Did you imagine I would book anything but the honeymoon suite?” 

Relief flooded every cell of Betty’s body, and she hugged her best friend. “Thank you, Veronica.” 

“Of course.” She took a step back. “No offense, but you look like you could use about three girls’ weekends. Sophomore year is supposed to be easier. How hard are they working you?”

Betty chewed on her lower lip for a moment, then turned from Veronica under the guise of starting to pack an overnight bag. Veronica, of course, had breezed in from Philadelphia fresh as a hothouse orchid and without a single hair out of place, as though she had never been caught in a breeze at all. She _was_ the breeze, Betty supposed, and even the rigors of attending an Ivy League school wouldn’t be enough to shake her poise. She wouldn’t have been at all surprised to learn that Veronica was more than halfway to being named president of Penn, or at the very least, to running the Wharton School by herself. 

“Not too bad,” she said eventually. “I’m probably just overstressing myself.” 

They retreated to the hotel, where Veronica had already set them up with champagne and chocolate croissants and nail polish. Aside from Betty also being wrapped in a luxury bathrobe instead of an old fuzzy one she’d brought from home, it felt exactly like their high school sleepovers at the Pembrooke. This, she thought, was good. This was what she needed. 

“So, tell me everything that’s happened since I saw you last,” she said, before Veronica could ask her the same question. And Veronica Lodge, bless her, was not one to leave out details. Betty didn’t have to confess to a single thing. 

Until she woke up gasping in the middle of the night. 

She barely even registered that Veronica had woken up, or that Veronica had turned the bedside lamp on—though of course Veronica had woken up; they were, after all, sharing the king-sized bed, and Betty had just scrambled bouncily into a sitting position—until a hand landed on her knee. 

“Bad dream?” Veronica asked, and Betty nodded. 

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m okay. Go back to sleep.” 

Veronica did not go back to sleep. “Do you need to talk about it?” 

“No,” Betty said, shaking her head firmly. “No. I’m fine.” 

There was a pause. Betty felt Veronica’s eyes on her, but concentrated on picking at a speck of stray fingernail polish on her cuticle that she hadn’t noticed earlier. 

“Did you ever look into seeing someone?” Veronica asked gently. “I’m sure the school has some good people.” 

Betty felt her eyes start to fill with tears, and furiously attempted to wish them away. Of _course_ she had, she wanted to say; of course she had stepped cautiously through the doors of the old yellow Victorian that housed the Counseling Center. Of course she had tried talking about it, in individual sessions and in a group. But it was impossible, she had found: it was simply impossible to convey how _those experiences_ had felt, and it was even more impossible to sit there with the weight of a neutral gaze bearing down on her shoulders, to withstand the jolt of shock she inevitably saw in even the most hardened mental health professional’s eyes, to be told she was _already so strong_ (whatever that meant) by someone who didn’t know her. 

“I’m working on it,” she said, and Veronica smiled.

  
  
  
  


She drives back to Syracuse on Sunday afternoon with Jughead’s old gray beanie on the passenger seat beside her, unsure how she feels about being entrusted with it. True, it’s the most personal item he could possibly have given her; at one point in Jughead’s life, she would have understood the gift of his hat as the closest possible substitute for his literal, beating heart. 

But now—now it also seems like a declaration that the boy who once climbed through her bedroom window is well and truly gone. 

_It’s just a hat_ , she tells herself. 

Back in her own tiny studio, she folds the beanie neatly in half and places it on her bedside table. 

Jughead calls her later that night, and she leans back against her headboard with her knees drawn into her chest. 

“You made it back okay?” 

“Yeah,” she replies, knowing they both know she did; she’d texted him, after all. “The roads weren’t bad.” 

Betty pulls the hat from her nightstand and drapes it over one knee, poking at the little red pin on the side as they talk. They don’t talk about much of anything, seeing as they just spent most of the weekend together. But then, that’s not the point. 

When she goes to bed that night, she pulls the hat over again and gives it a tentative sniff. It smells only like the inside of a cheap particleboard dresser. 

She gets out of bed and puts it in her own sock drawer. 

The hat won’t be permanently out of sight or out of mind there. Betty does, after all, wear socks every day at this time of year. But she’s tired of being reminded of the past. She’s ready to move on. 

The irony that she intends to move on with her high school boyfriend is not lost on her.

  
  
  
  


January passes in a haze of gray skies and snow flurries and a drive that’s become so familiar Betty now finds it both endless and instantaneous. She doesn’t make it to see Jughead every weekend, but three out of four, they’ve decided, isn’t at all bad. 

She has a Friday afternoon routine now. After her morning class, she hops in her car and drives up to Oswego, bringing along a granola bar in lieu of actual lunch because there’s a diner in Oswego she’s come to quite like. The diner has a seat at the lunch counter that’s mysteriously never cleared off until she arrives and sits there, almost as though someone is reserving that seat for her, and it employs a particularly attractive fry cook who’s happy to let her nurse a single grilled cheese combo until his shift ends. 

Then she follows the fry cook home to his apartment and, for lack of a better term, fucks him silly. 

“Things are better,” she tells Veronica, holding her phone in her right hand as Jughead plays with the fingers of her left. “Good, even.” 

“You’re talking to someone?” 

She looks to her left, lets her gaze travel slowly upwards from their interlocked hands to Jughead’s face, which she studies for a moment. 

“Yeah,” she says. “I am.” 

Jughead remains perfectly silent until after she’s hung up. 

“You haven’t told anyone,” he says, his voice a studied, careful neutral. 

“Not yet.” 

Betty swallows once, then leans over so her head rests on his shoulder. Not yet, she hasn’t, and she’s not sure when— _if_ , even—she’ll be ready to. Why she isn’t ready yet remains unclear to her. Is it because they’ve been down this road so many times before and she’s afraid of what people will think (but since when has she ever been afraid of that)? Or is it because they’ve been down this road so many times before and she’s afraid yet another dead end is on the horizon? Or is there another reason entirely, one that has not yet presented itself clearly to her? 

“It’s okay, Betty,” Jughead tells her. But she wonders if it is, and whether he’s wondering the same thing. “I haven’t told anyone either.” 

She knows that’s not entirely true. She’s been introduced to some of his local acquaintances. There’s the staff at the diner, of course. She’s also met a few kids from his classes, ones to whom he’s started tentatively attaching the word _friends_. Every time, always, he has introduced her with the words “This is Betty, my girlfriend.” 

She does not know—but strongly suspects, for reasons she can’t articulate—that he’s told _Toni_. 

He has told people, but she has not. 

She does not drive to Oswego the next weekend.

  
  
  
  


Upstate New York is still frozen and dreary when February rolls around, frozen and dreary and responsible for its usual share of seasonal depression. Betty feels fine, or at least like she’s perfectly functional and coping, but she doesn’t realize how low her spirits have gotten until she steps outside her apartment building for her morning class one Friday and finds a cute (if not so mysterious) boy on a motorcycle in her parking lot, and her mood suddenly lifts. 

“Oh, my god, Juggie,” she says, rushing over at once. “How did you stand getting up here on the bike?” 

He shrugs, but she can sense his lips are numb with cold even before she kisses him. 

“It’s fine,” he says. “Although I’ve been warmer.” 

Betty glances at the time on her phone, then bites her lip. “I have to go to class,” she says. “I’d skip it, but there’s a quiz today. Do you—” She digs her keys out and hands them to him, pointing out the one with the pink sleeve. “That’s the front door; the blue one’s my apartment. 3B.” 

He nods. 

“I didn’t know you were coming this weekend,” she adds. 

“It’s Valentine’s Day this weekend, is it not?” 

She almost laughs. “And you’re vehemently against this particular holiday, are you not?” 

“Not when I have a girlfriend,” he jokes, and then adds, more seriously, “I just missed you. Don’t worry, I’m not going to flower-bomb your apartment or anything.” 

She has a million things she needs to say in return, but she really does have to go to class—so she settles for “I love you” for now, and hurries off. 

She returns three hours later to find her apartment has been flower-bombed after all, with a truly enormous bouquet of red roses in a spectacular cut-glass vase she did not previously own dwarfing a much more modest one balanced precariously in a water glass. Cliché though it might be, Betty’s heart swells right out of her chest at the smaller bouquet, and lands on her face in a broad smile. 

“Despite botanical evidence to the contrary,” Jughead tells her in a voice that’s only moderately annoyed, “Veronica does _not_ love you more than I do.” 

“I’ll need you to prove that,” she says, which it turns out Jughead is more than willing to do. 

Later that day, she stands in her kitchenette waiting to take a sheet of heart-shaped sugar cookies out of the oven. The smaller bouquet of roses—now transferred to a more stable glass orange juice pitcher—stands on the ledge of her pass-through window. Beyond it, she can see Jughead sitting cross-legged in her bed, propped up on her ridiculously floral pillows, banging away at his laptop with his usual scowl of concentration. 

Warmth spreads through every artery, every vein, every capillary of her body. 

Betty lifts her phone from the counter and switches it to camera mode, framing the scene so that the flowers blur in the foreground and Jughead comes into sharp focus in the back. She takes a few shots in quick succession, then selects the nicest one and sends it to Polly with the words _Good day_. 

A few minutes later, her phone buzzes with Polly’s response. _I told you so_ , Polly’s written, the sentence punctuated with several hearts.

  
  
  
  


They lay in her bed, tangled in each other, listening to a rather formidable early April shower beat against her windowpanes. 

“I’ve been thinking about something.” Jughead’s words rumble right into the ear she has pressed against his bare chest, and she tightens her grip on his waist. “About this.” 

He nods towards his right shoulder. Betty sits up; he does too, both of them gazing at the two-headed snake. Since they got back together, he’s stopped trying to keep it covered up around her. A few times, she’s wondered how much the tattoo still bothers him. But she hasn’t asked. 

“What about it?” 

“Getting rid of it.” 

Betty considers this for a moment. “Like… laser removal?” 

“No,” says Jughead, shaking his head. “I can’t afford that. But I could get it covered up, maybe.” 

For the first time in a long time—maybe even the first time in years, since the ink was fresh—Betty traces the snake with her index finger. In her mind, it’s become a sort of ugly birthmark, something she doesn’t much like to look at but knows Jughead can’t help having. This, she's found, keeps her from having to think about it too much. Her very worst memories of Jughead are tied up in snake tattoos, and so are her very worst memories of herself. 

“Is that what you want?” she says, cautiously. 

They have not talked about _anyone’s_ snake tattoos since the day Jughead returned from his summer in Toledo.

  
  
  
  


Betty met him at the bus stop even though he’d explicitly told her not to; he seemed reluctantly happy to see her, all the same. He was bareheaded, and wearing only jeans and a t-shirt. He did not want to see anyone else, not Archie or Toni or his dad, and so Betty ducked into Pop’s for takeout. 

They decided to take a walk down by Sweetwater River. 

It was there, on the river’s edge, that Jughead told her _everything_ he had done with the Serpents—including what he had done to Penny Peabody. It was there, at the spot they had once watched Archie punch through a sheet of ice to save Cheryl Blossom, that Betty fled ten feet—which was as far as she could get before she involuntarily regurgitated a burger and half a strawberry milkshake into the bushes. 

She expected Jughead to be gone when she returned, but he was still sitting on the same rock where she’d left him, staring at the most turbulent part of the water. 

This was it, she thought. She knew at once that Jughead had decided to lay every single card on the table because he wanted to disgust her with what he’d become. She knew he wanted her reaction, and that he wanted it to be furious. She knew he meant to push her away for good, make everything stick once and for all. 

Instead she sat down beside him and put her hand on his knee. Jughead looked at her hand, and then at her, and shook his head. 

“You should be fleeing in terror,” he said, rather pointedly. 

“Have you just been dwelling on that all summer?” 

There was a long pause before Jughead got out the words “Not exclusively.” 

“Juggie…” 

Her nails dug into flesh, but she didn’t feel the usual calming sting of pain that was supposed to accompany the gesture; it took her a moment to recognize that this was because she was digging them into Jughead’s knee instead of her own palm. He did not complain. 

_Hear me out_ , she thought in desperation, knowing she would need to choose her next words with extraordinary care. _Please, just hear me out_. 

“I can’t condone any of that,” she started. “Obviously. But… your actions, what you did—Jughead, I know you. I know you wouldn’t have done those things if you hadn’t been put in an impossible situation in the first place. And the situation wasn’t your fault.” She took a deep breath and let it out, slowly. “Some of it was mine.” 

She could feel Jughead’s entire body stiffen. “None of it was—”

“Do you think I don’t wonder every day whether you would have joined the Serpents if I hadn’t sent Archie to break up with you?” she asked. “Because I do. I ask myself that every single day, Jughead. If I had been strong enough to go over there myself, could I have talked you out of running the gauntlet? If I had stopped _him_ in time—” 

Abruptly, Jughead pushed to his feet. “This is not about you,” he said in a low voice, and when Betty finally succeeded in looking at him, she realized Jughead might be in immediate danger of regurgitating a burger into the bushes himself. 

Betty stood up herself, feeling her eyes fill with tears as she did so. She was about to protest that this was about her, that it was about _everything_ , but Jughead’s hand landed on her shoulder, and she bit her tongue instead. 

“You’re not responsible for anything I did, Betty,” he said, spitting the sentence at her in a way that felt entirely too snake-like. 

He grabbed the trash from their lunch and disappeared into the woods without another word, and Betty collapsed back onto the rock, tears spilling freely now. It took a good long while before she realized that, in trying to alleviate some of his blame, she had actually made Jughead feel worse about himself. 

A week later, just before it was time to begin her annual newspaper staff recruitment event, Jughead entered the _Blue and Gold_ offices… backwards. Through the doorway, Betty could see a letterman’s jacket and an accompanying flash of red hair. 

What, she wondered, had Jughead said to Archie that would have made Archie literally shove him through the door? 

But there were too many other people around to get into any of that now, so she merely brightened her smile. “And here’s our associate editor,” she announced, entirely on impulse. “Jughead’s been on our staff ever since the _Blue and Gold_ was rebooted. He’ll be a great resource if you have any questions.” 

Jughead leaned against the doorframe, folded his arms across his chest, and rolled his eyes at her. She smiled back.

  
  
  
  


“Is that what you want?” she says again, when Jughead doesn’t respond. 

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’m not… _not_ a Serpent. I mean, I’m obviously not in right now, but…” 

“But you’re not really sure you’re out,” she finishes. “No, I get it. They were your life for a while.” 

“Yeah.” Jughead remains silent for a moment, contemplating his own arm, and then asks, “So what do you think?” 

There’s a weight behind the words that drives home what Betty knows anyway, that he’s asking about far more than the tattoo itself. 

“I think it doesn’t dictate the rest of your life,” she says. “Either way. If you leave it or cover it up or wait until you can afford to have it removed entirely. It’s a mark on your skin, Jug. I know it’s supposed to bind you to them. But it only has that power if you let it.” 

Slowly, Jughead draws in an enormous deep breath; he lets it out just as slowly. 

“What?” she says, at the funny look now creeping over his face. 

His answer is simple: “You.” 

“Me, what?” 

“Just you,” he says. “Honestly, just you.” 

He slides down onto his back, then wraps an arm around her waist to pull her with him. For half a second, she considers protesting; she considers, even, going to her sock drawer and pulling out his old hat. But only for half a second. Then she acquiesces, melting against his side. 

Together, they listen to the rain.

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> If I come out with a Cheryl Blossom POV based on "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover," we'll know I've officially gone too far. 
> 
> As always, comments make my day (and encourage me to write more stuff!), so please do leave a review when you have the chance. <3


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